I am going to open this post with “If you are not connecting with your customers and leads via email marketing you probably should be”
However this is not the vein of topic for this post, this post is about the drop in your gut you might experience when your email newsletter stats come back and people have stopped loving you by unsubscribing to you and why you should relish it.
Secondly this post is about promoting your unsubscribe feature and why you should do so.
So lets get back to the emotional turmoil of dealing with unsubscribes. One of the biggest takeaways you can get from someone unsubscribing is “why did they unsubscribe”. Many newsletter platforms have an option to request “tell us why you are unsubscribing” but if you’re like me, once I unsubscribe I usually can’t be bothered unless its a checkbox option. So going further into this there are a couple of things we can have a look at.
Firstly, and this is often one of the biggest reasons people unsubscribe, is “how relevant and interesting is my content to my subscribers? Often followed by how often do I contact them, too frequently (do I annoy them) or too infrequently (do they forget me) and lets also throw into the mix “do I provide a good user experience (does my email look great on all email clients and devices?)
Having a look at month by month stats can give you an indication if your unsubscribe rate is trending and if so why could that be. Are you losing focus in the time spent to create the newsletter or even has someone else started writing the newsletter.
 If the stats over the past 6 months do not reflect a trending unsubscribe rate and it’s a bit of a one off then obviously looking closely at the content of this particular newsletter is key to ensure you reduce the chance of repeating. Looking into the statistics of the newsletter with a high focus into what’s clicked on will tell you two things. A: If it hasn’t been clicked or has a very low click rate then the content or content type or content positioning is probably not engaging enough. If it has high clicks then a comparative look at your website analytics to see what happened on the website as a result of those click can also provide some insights into whether the relevance of the landing pages clicked through to were relevant and engaging enough to capture the visitors attention.
For many small business owners this may be going way out of your comfort zone but whether getting someone like Marketing Fuel to help you understand this data or to teach you how to understand this data yourselves can make a huge difference in terms of ensuring you get the best outcome from the efforts you put into creating an email newsletter.
The second point is a very simple point I would like to get across and that is “promote your unsubscribe link”. You may well ask “why the hell would I want to promote my unsubscribe button, I want people to keep getting my emails not unsubscribe from them”.
I should emphasise that this is more relevant to companies with new or young databases that haven’t yet gained a solid following. The reason is that if someone clicks the “Mark as Spam” link on your email it does way more than simply put it in their junk mail folder. the deeper ramifications are that most times the isp is alerted that this message should be marked as spam and this has a very real bearing on your ability to continue marketing electronically. Being marked as spam is effectively considered an “Abuse Report” which in itself is a contributor to violating the anti spam laws within the electronic messaging act.
An unsubscribe is simply an unsubscribe, bummer people just don’t dig your email anymore but believe me it’s way better than an abuse report.
If you would like to find out how you can make better use of your email and web analytics to make smart decisions then drop Russell an email at russell@marketingfuel.co.nz.
